Liliendahl on Data Quality

The other day the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools was released.

If you are interested in knowing what it says, it’s normally possible to download a copy from the leading vendors’ website.

Among the information in the paper you will find some estimated numbers of customers who has purchased the tools from the vendors included in the quadrant.

If you sum up these numbers, then it is estimated that 16,540 organizations worldwide is a customer at an included vendor.

So, if I matched that compiled customer list with the Dun & Bradstreet WorldBase holding at least 100 million active business entities worldwide, I will have a group of at least 99,983,460 companies who is not using magical data quality tools.

And that is probably falsely excluding that there are customers who has more than one vendor.

Anyway, what do all the others do then?

Well, of course the overwhelming number of companies will be too small to have any chance of investing in a data quality tool from a vendor that made it to the quadrant.

The quadrant also list a range of other vendors of data quality tools typically operating locally around the world. These vendors also have customers and probably more customers in numbers but not at the size of the companies who chooses a vendor in the quadrant.   

A lot of data quality technology is also used by service providers who either use a tool from a data quality tool vendor or has made a homegrown solution. So a lot of companies benefit from such services when processing large number of data records to be standardized, deduplicated and enriched.

Then we must not forget that technology doesn’t solve all your data quality issues as stated by the founder of DataQualityPro Dylan Jones in a recent post on a data quality forum operated by the (according to Gartner) leading data quality tool vendor. The post is called Finding the Passion for Data Quality.

My take is that it’s totally true that data quality tools doesn’t solve most of your data quality issues, but those issues addressed, typically data profiling and data matching, are hard to solve without a tool. So there is still a huge market out there currently covered by the true leader in the data quality market: Laissez-Faire.